Let the slaughter begin

 

            

           

The following is the translation from Italian of a chapter of Gabriele Adinolfi's book Orchestra Rossa, published by AVATAR editions. The subtitle of the book reads: "Massacres: the truth that may not be told." The massacres began with the ruthless bombing of a Milan branch of the Banca Nazionale dell'Agricoltura in 1969. That year marked the beginning of a bloody terrorist campaign in Italy. The truth about who carried it out cannot be told, at least openly, because it conflicts with the official version of the events, that has been enshrined now in books, films, documentaries and sadly even in the final decisions issued by some Italian courts. 

The disastrous Italian defeat in WWII was followed by the total loss of sovereignty of the Italians over their own land. The defeat turned Italy from an open battlefield to a terrain disputed in a covered war among foreign and domestic combatants, which turned sanguinary during the 1970's decade. Gabriele Adinolfi has lived through those terrible years. He has suffered personally the consequences of the mystification and the attempts to deviate the course of the investigations of terrorist attacks on the part of a judiciary that has not always been on the side of justice. I think his contribution should be heard.

Thanks to Janice Jenkins for reviewing the English translation.

Your comments and questions, as always, will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

L. Pavese

 

The Birth of Terrorism in Italy

By Gabriele Adinolfi (translated and edited by L. Pavese)

Before the slaughter

Older readers might remember. With the 1963 accession to power of the center-left coalition in Italy, among the reforms that were implemented – such as the education reform which began emptying classes of their cultural content – there was the partial occupation of RAI ( Radio Televisione Italiana), the public broadcasting service.

The occupation was accomplished through card-carrying members of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), left-leaning factions of the DC (Christian Democratic Party) and by “independent” members of parliament. A Gramsci-inspired process of restructuring in which, at least momentarily, all the progressive and subversive forces found a common cause was on its way.

During the 1964-65 two-year period, marking the twentieth anniversary of the “Liberation War” of Italy, freed from the power of the Italians and delivered to the Anglo-American duopoly, numerous movie films that idolized the partisans of the Italian “resistance” were broadcast on the only existing Italian TV channel, consequently providing a justification for violence and cold-blooded assassinations, if they were committed against the supporters of a dictatorship.

The archetype of the evildoer against whom the masses rose, and the justification for vengeance and summary executions were also conveyed through Hollywood movies. TV-serialized drama shows, from Robin Hood to The Black Arrow (A Tale of the Two Roses), encouraged young people to rebel against authority. Alongside the already established Italian neo-realism and investigative film genre, the talent and the message of very gifted anarchist directors, like Sergio Leone, were gaining ground in the Rome film-production studios, Cinecittà.

During the entire 1960’s decade, against the background of moral upheaval, rebellion in the family, musical revolution, on the road, beat and hitch-hiking way of life the belief that it was possible and indeed mandatory to make a clean slate of the past gained ground, and that the aspirations of young people were legitimate per se and should not be dependent from anything or anybody.  

 

 

For youngsters endowed with more adrenaline, trips with a machine-pistol to Cuba, or to Africa with the mercenaries were available. Many began to believe in the myth of insurrection and revolution. That explains why several left-leaning intellectuals – the writer Umberto Eco among them – and men and women of the entertainment world in 1971 signed a declaration in favor of armed insurrection that was published by Lotta Continua. (Please read the names of signatories and the text in the note [1])

 In the European universities the student assemblies backed the cause of the Vietnamese against the U.S. intervention. Usually there stood out a very explicit slogan: “The Vietcong win because they shoot.” It was replaced soon after by: “Never again without a gun!”

1967 was a pivotal year of the militarization of youth for two essential reasons. The first was the so-called Six-Day War, that is, the Israeli attack against Egypt and Syria. The attack caused a schizophrenic reaction in Italy, where ninety percent of the media were aligned with Israel, but only the PRI (Italian Republican Party) openly backed her. All the other parties, and the Catholic Church, sided with the Arab cause or, at least, were inclined to spread the guilt among the warring parties.

Israel severed her traditional ties with the USSR, who fifteen years before had backed the Israeli invasion of Palestine with an air bridge from Czechoslovakia. The Jewish state also risked isolation, because of the June 8 Israeli attack against the American surveillance ship USS Liberty operating off the coast of Israel, which caused the death of thirty-four crew members. A year later, the vessel would be declared a loss and scrapped, and the attack would be archived as a mistake.

 

 

Israel had now shown her muscles, destroying the existing balance and assuming a new role. The result was a wide-ranging strategy that influenced all the period known in Italy as the Anni di Piombo, the Years of Lead.

What was that role? As it was explained in 1973 to Renato Curcio and Alberto Franceschini (founders of the Brigate Rosse, the Italian Red Brigades) by Mossad agents, it was in part to destabilize the Mediterranean region so that supporting Israel would always seem indispensable to Washington; and in part it was intended to extend Israel’s influence in Europe through the cracks that were gradually appearing.

To obtain that objective, it was necessary on one hand to widen those fractures and, on the other hand, to establish a solid cooperation with the parties who were interested in the destabilization (such as the East Germany DDR’s STASI) as well as with those who wanted stability (such as the American capitalist interests).

A second episode of great importance for the collective imagination was the killing of Che Guevara, at the end of a disastrous expedition in Bolivia, who became a revolutionary icon, before being demoted to the T-shirts of stoned middle-class kids.

I would also add a third event, which passed almost unnoticed, that is, the protest in West Berlin orchestrated by the STASI and by the Frankfurt School that happened almost concurrently with the Six-Day War.

In Italy, 1967 marked the beginning of the campaign for an armed insurrection among the extreme political left. Among the most ardent proponent of the lighting of the fire was the Marquis Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the billionaire publisher. Counted among his friends were Fidel Castro, the head of the blood-thirsty Milan GAP (Gruppi Azione Patriottica) Giovanni Pesce (alias Visone), Stalinist leader Pietro Secchia and, later, the Ligurian partisan leader Giambattista Lazagna who was himself associated with Israel “il Rosso” (the “red one”), a future owner of night clubs in Milan. 

 

Giangiacomo Feltrinelli

 

After so many attempts to light a fire, one would eventually be ignited in Genoa, where the XXII October Group would generate the Gruppi Azione Partigiana, the first nucleus of the Red Brigades.

On March 26, 1971, in Genoa, an armed robbery for the purpose of financing the group, carried out by two militants with the help of an insider at the I.A.C.P. – the Italian national public housing agency – ended with the killing of the clerk who was carrying the money, who resisted and was shot point-blank by Mario Rossi, the leader of the group. An amateur photographer, from a window, was able to document the salient moments of the killing. 

 

Genoa, March 26, 1971

 

Mario Rossi was arrested the same day; the other terrorist, Augusto Viel, was captured in Milan in 1972 in an apartment owned by the GAP. They were both convicted and sentenced by judge Mario Sossi.

In 1974, the kidnapping of judge Mario Sossi marked the transition of the Red Brigades to the so-called “strategy of tension.”

Meanwhile, on the right.

The two coups of Algiers, a successful one in 1958 and a failed one in 1961, along with the growth of the communist threat deluded the far right in believing that the time was mature for a coup d’état that the U.S. would support for fear of losing strategic components of NATO.

In 1967 a successful coup took place in Greece, although the intent of the coup was more anti-British than anti-Soviet. Whatever the case, in the world of the Italian far right, who is vital and ambitious but lacks a political plan, the idea of a coup d’état gained ground.

Therefore, between May 3 and May 5, at the Parco dei Principi Hotel in Rome there was a convention organized by the Alberto Pollio Institute, a private group linked to the Italian military intelligence services. The subject of the meeting was the revolutionary war that was being carried out by communists throughout the world, and the necessity of not leaving the initiative to the subversive forces but rather to counteract their advance. Giuseppe “Pino” Rauti and the leadership of his Ordine Nuovo (New Order) group participated in the meeting which was pervaded by obvious suggestions of a coup d’état. 

Behind the Italian apparatuses there were the Anglo-Americans, mainly the Britons, who were interested in feeding the political tension to quash the Italian ambitions in the Mediterranean region.

Renato Mieli participated to the meeting. The title of his speech was: “The Psychological Danger of Revolutionary War in Italy.” Renato Mieli, a Jew, had entered Rome with the Allied troops, whom he had joined in Paris after he had fled to Egypt following the Italian 1938 so-called “Racial Laws.” He had been appointed director of the national press agency A.N.S.A., which had replaced the De Stefani agency, and represented the British influence in Italy as established by agreements among the victors. Nevertheless, Mieli was a member of the communist party and he remained one till 1956 when, after the Hungarian revolt, he re-positioned himself as anti-communist or rather, more precisely, anti-Soviet.

His son Paolo, who was very young at the time, was an extreme left sympathizer and later a member of “Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power). He was also one of the signatories of the aforementioned pro-armed insurrection declaration on Lotta Continua. He is now a very well-established editorialist in Italy.

The Americans took a wait and see attitude. Probably, because their intention was to encourage successive actions that they could throttle at birth. Since 1961 in fact, the progressive line of the CIA. had prevailed on the more conservative FBI.’s positions and flushing out the Italian reactionaries was only to the CIA.’s advantage. After all, the CIA. had opposed Randolfo Pacciardi’s previous year attempted putsch to turn Italy into a presidential republic.

In a 1980’s interview, Palmiro Togliatti’s personal physician, Dr. Aldo Spallone revealed that in 1964, in the days in which the word golpe was in the air, some CIA officers approached him and expressed the CIA.’s availability to back a DC-PCI based government as an alternative to a presidential republic, which was considered, by the Americans, too favorable to German and French interests.

To promote continuous coupe d’état attempts could possibly have been a good way to “skim the scum off the top,” that is, to flush out the most problematic individuals. And maybe that was what happened during the 1970 failed Valerio Borghese coup.

The fact is that, with these endeavors, the Italian far right managed only to criminalize itself and to provide a screen for the red insurrectionists, who would have a lot of fun making everyone believe they were acting as the defenders of republican freedoms.

But, after the Parco dei Principi meeting, did a certain part of the Venetian neo-fascist world actually organize in a conspiratorial and terrorist form, as communist historiography and some magistrates maintain? It is plausible there were some attempts, but they were disorderly, spontaneous, improvised and with low level connections. The results were disastrous and provided a diversion to cover the real responsibilities of the following years.

The bomb of Piazza Fontana

December 12, 1969, Milano, Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura (National Agriculture Bank). A bomb exploded at 4:37 pm and caused seventeen dead and eighty-eight wounded. One of the most believable opinion is that whoever placed the bomb thought that it would have exploded when the bank was closed. The delay in closing was caused by ongoing transactions in the cattle market. That is plausible, although it does not absolve the perpetrators of their responsibility.

 

 

That explosion, at the end of a Fall season rendered hot by labor disputes, was not isolated. There were three more bombs in Rome: one in front of the Altare della Patria (the Victor Emmanuel II monument), one at the Museum of Risorgimento and one in a Via Veneto's street -crossing underpass. These bombings caused seventeen wounded and were all imputed to anarchists. However, soon after a mythomaniac individual showed up and exculpated the anarchists, bringing up the involvement of Mafia and neo-fascists. That was nothing extraordinary, if the deranged man who later retracted his fantastic statement had not been a German, one Udo Lemke.

 

Udo Lemke

 

            The following is an excerpt from the lebombediroma.blogspot.com: “Udo Lemke, a self-described chemistry student from Germany, showed up to the Piazza San Lorenzo Carabinieri military police station in Rome on December 13, 1969, as a witness of the bombing of the Altare della Patria. He would tell the Carabinieri that he had recognized the attackers as the same three Sicilians who, fifteen days ago, in Catania, had offered him a rather well-paid job, that is, “to place a few bags in some Italian squares and run.” Lemke stated that he had realized that the “job” was probably illegal and had refused. That had angered the Sicilians, who had clearly told him that he'd better  to get out of town.

            Lemke had gone to Rome and moved in with some hippies who squatted in the catacombs of the Aracoeli, below the Unknown Soldier monument. And he was there when he had heard the explosion of the bomb. He had gone out and recognized the attackers who were getting away in a white FIAT 124 sedan.”

 

 

             The anarchist Pietro Valpreda was initially charged as the person who had materially carried out the massacre at the National Agriculture Bank in Milan. Valpreda had taken part in several pro-armed insurrection meetings promoted by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli.

            Valpreda was accused by a taxi driver, Cornelio Rolandi who, it must be pointed out, was a member of the Communist Party. The taxi-driver had been surprised by the short ride that Valpreda had made to the bank, where he had asked the driver to wait. Rolandi testified that Valpreda had gone in the direction of the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura with a bag and, after a few minutes, had come back without it.

            Rolandi was the object of a constant daily and pressing attempt of de-legitimization through threatening graffiti on the wall of his apartment building.    

            Verification of his testimony was hindered by a series of bureaucratic obstacles, which seemed to indicate a lack of motivation on the part of the investigators. Eventually, Rolandi died of complications from a stomach ulcer on July 13, 1971.

            Three days after the bombing, Giuseppe Pinelli, another anarchist who had been arrested by the police fell from a window of the police station. The mantra of the Left was: Pinelli was killed by police commissioner Luigi Calabresi. Calabresi, in turn, was murdered on May 17, 1972 by a commando of the far left group Lotta Continua. 

 

 

            The communist investigating magistrate, Gerardo D’Ambrosio, who was assigned the case in 1975, closed it, stating that Giuseppe Pinelli had intentionally jumped from the window after he had recognized a steel container, in possession of the police, as one of the containers he had purchased for Pietro Valpreda.

            The radical left was also convinced the anarchists were guilty and carried out an internal investigation. Their documents were retrieved in 1974 by Carabinieri General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa’s men in the Red Brigades’ hideout of Robbiano della Mediglia, near Milan.

            That first massacre in Milan made a great sensation. After an early moment of euphoria, the extreme left decided that it would be better to distance themselves from it. That had not been their first reaction though. In several permanent assemblies in occupied universities hearty and loud applause broke out at the news of the hit at the bank.

            The “theory” of the state sponsored massacre.

            After the arrest of Pietro Valpreda – and with him the anarcho-fascist Mario Merlino – the left launched their counteroffensive with a book by Marco Ligini and Eduardo Di Giovanni: La strage di stato. Controinchiesta (The State Massacre. A Counter-Investigation). The original idea for the title was Il Reichstag brucia! (The Reichstag is burning!). That was an explicit reference to the February 27, 1933 fire at the German parliament building, set by communists among whom was Marinus Van der Lubbe, who was guillotined the following January.

            The fire at the German parliament (which had been supporting Adolf Hitler’s chancellorship for less than a month) is still presented by communist propaganda as a deception devised by Hermann Goering to discredit his own party, in order to provoke the dissolution of parliament.

 

 

            Communist propagandists invented the “strategy of tension” scheme on that occasion, and they have been applied it rigorously since then, trampling on evidence in order to affirm their theory of innovative and healthy forces that emerge from the social subconscious but are regularly suppressed in a constant psychoanalytical version of society.

            This technique would become a standard. In 1969, the year of the Piazza Fontana massacre, the movie by Franco-Greek film-director Costa Gavras, entitled "Z", was released. The film was awarded the Academy Award for best foreign picture.

            This intentionally allegorical story was intended to unmask the work of Greek police's provocateurs who, perpetrating bloody acts and attributing them to the political opposition, would have painted the utopian Greek left as subversive and justified therefore the April 21, 1967 Greek Colonels’ coup d’état.

            Just for a change, we are faced again with mystification. The Greek coup was neither the work of the U.S. CIA, nor of the American military who actually had let it happen for a very simple reason: the Greek military with their coup de main and, above all, with the overthrowing of the monarchy, had moved to check the British influence in Greece.

            But the Greek putsch, represented in a totally distorted way, would become a mythological stronghold of the insurrectionist European Left. Because the threat of a coup d’état justified the creation of “democratic” militias – which in many cases predated the threat – and the training of militants with weapons and explosives. The maneuvers of undercover infiltrated government agents provided a justification for every crime committed by the progressive justice warriors who always came out clean.

            What about the bombs of 1969 then? According to the leftist version the culprits were, of course, the anarcho-fascists infiltrated Mario Merlino and his boss Stefano Delle Chiaie, leader of Avanguardia Nazionale, in accord with the intelligence services. Never mind that, as Delle Chiaie pointed out, the Italian Ministry of the Interior had collaborated with the writing of the accusatory book by Ligini and Di Giovanni. 

            Valpreda and Pinelli

            Pietro Valpreda and Giuseppe Pinelli would become two symbols of the counteroffensive of the whole Italian Left.

            Leftist militants for years afterwards, would sing:

            “Anarchico Pinelli, te l’hanno fatta brutta:

            Han preso la tua vita e l’han tutta distrutta!

            Anarchico Valpreda, fuori dalla galera!

            I veri assassini han la camicia nera!”

            (Anarchist Pinelli, they threw you in the void

            Your whole life was taken and totally destroyed!

            Anarchist Valpreda let’s give his freedom back!

            Piazza Fontana's killers still wear the color black!)

            Was Valpreda recognized by the taxi driver Rolandi, who was a member of the Communist party? Since Valpreda himself had admitted being in Milan that day, the Left counteroffensive focused on proving the man who had boarded the cab just to travel a few hundred yards was not him. (Valpreda probably had already activated the timer, something that he could not do in the bank, and wanted to avoid any problem during the trip).

            The red political commissars did not lack inventive, and from their magician top-hat they produced a Valpreda look-alike. His name was Antonio Sottosanti. Since his parents were fascist sympathizers and he had served in the French Foreign Legion, he surely must have been a fascist. And since he frequented the anarchists’ circle of Ponte della Ghisolfa in Milan, and because he was a friend of Giuseppe Pinelli, he must obviously have been a fascist infiltrator, who had been chosen precisely to make Valpreda a suspect.

 

             Sottosanti was said to be close to Pino Rauti’s Ordine Nuovo movement. But for what reason would Ordine Nuovo have employed a very recognizable anarchist from Milan to frame a man who lived in Rome is a mystery that was never clarified. In any case, the suspects would remain circumscribed to the Milanese anarchist circles.

            As far as the death of Pinelli is concerned, there are three possibilities: he committed suicide; he was killed or he died in a very violent interrogation and the body was thrown from the window to hide the fact.

            The third hypothesis is the one that makes more sense. If we considered the first two hypotheses, both strengthen the case against the anarchists. In fact, if we eliminate the hypothesis of a suicide caused by desperation, there remains the possibility of a murder to prevent Pinelli from speaking. But what would Pinelli have spoken about, except his own political group? It is unimaginable that he had evidence to accuse other factions.

            Personally, this writer does not believe Pinelli was murdered to prevent him from speaking. Because even if anybody in the state apparatuses had been aware of the entire plot, it is highly unlikely that the police knew, and the police officers would let themselves be dragged in a messy murder with undesired and unpredictable consequences.

            The Venetian tracks

            Meanwhile, a new offensive of the Left had started in the Venetia. Magistrates Luigi Bianchi d’Espinosa and Giancarlo Stiz, who would be joined later by Gerardo D’Ambrosio, were investigating a group they identified as “Ordinovista” (from the movement Ordine Nuovo), which initially was said to be led by Pino Rauti himself. The prominent figures among the "Ordinovisti" would have been Giorgio Franco Freda and Giovanni Ventura. Just so the “State Sponsored Massacre” label would not go amiss, SID (Military Intelligence) agent Guido Giannettini was also included in the investigation. Giannettini was probably guilty of having investigated red terrorism a little too closely, documenting the role of the Trotskyist Fourth International and the Israeli Mossad played in it. 

            The group was oddly mixed in terms of ideological provenance. It was easy to connect them with other attacks by Milanese anarchists. So, eventually the Venetians were also connected to the Piazza Fontana massacre. They were all acquitted by the Italian Cassation Court in 1987. There had never been any concrete evidence against them.

            At the same time, other neo-fascists suspects were identified, including Delfo Zorzi who had been living in Japan since 1974 and had become a Japanese subject. The testimony weighed against him was that of a “pentito" (a "repented" person who was accused of being associated with terrorists and turned informant, in exchange for a break). The "pentito", Siciliano, seemed deranged more than anything else. He would tell the investigators that he had mentioned the events of December 12, 1969 to Zorzi a few days later, in a Venice alley, and had received in return just a “very meaningful silence”.

            That was the ground on which trials were built in Italy at the time.

            Nobody took into consideration the phone call between two CIA agents in Italy, recorded in the 1990’s, in which one of them said: “Let them follow the neo-fascist trail.” It would remain in the pages of the files as a dead leaf.

            The Zorzi investigation also ended with an acquittal in 2005.

            On that occasion, however, with disarming nonchalance the acquittal sentence recited: “…the Piazza Fontana massacre was perpetrated by the subversive group, linked to Ordine Nuovo and led by Franco Freda e Giovanni Ventura, who may not be tried again because they were definitively acquitted of the crime in 1987. Although the aforementioned “Ordinovisti” were the ideological instigators of the crime, the material perpetrator of the massacre, that is the person who personally placed the briefcase with the bomb, was never identified.”

            The sentence negates the results of eighteen years of investigation and trials and nails as guilty the defendants who were already acquitted of the crime! It is hard to believe, but that happens in Italy. The justice system acquits the defendants, nevertheless the dogma of guilt is preserved in the institutional narrative.

            The ignored trail

            Why didn’t anybody think of prosecuting Giangiacomo Feltrinelli instead?

            He had gone hiding on December 5, 1969 after being questioned the day before about the attacks carried out by his XXII October group. His brother-in-law, Carlo Melega, who often accompanied him in his incendiary preaching, had said in a bar on December 12, 1969 (the day of the bank massacre): “Today something big is going to happen. You will read about it in the paper.”

            On December 28, when he was interrogated by the Carabinieri Melega said: “I have the gift of foresight.” No problem then. But to incriminate Delfo Zorzi a “meaningful silence” had been enough.

            On December 15, three days after the slaughter, the political affairs office of the police would request authorization to search the mansion of the billionaire guerrilla, but it was initially denied. A new judge would allow it a few days later, but there had been ample time to clean up by then.

            During the investigation, Feltrinelli would move alternatively between the Oberhof Austrian castle and the London circles that orbited the fourth Rothschild baron, who was himself linked to the British intelligence services who, we should remind the readers, had coined the expression “strategy of tension,” after the Piazza Fontana bombing.

            But there is more. Red Brigades’ member Roberto Fabbri would tell the investigating magistrate that Feltrinelli was looking for volunteers to place explosive charges in bank branches in the days preceding December 12, 1969.

            The Red Brigades, who were convinced the bombings had a red matrix and were obsessed with the possibility of manipulations, had started an internal investigation briefly thereafter. The files of the inquest would be seized by the Carabinieri in the Lombard farmhouse where Red Brigades’ fighter Roberto Ognibene was arrested. We know now that the conclusions of the Red Brigades’ investigation, having declared Pinelli’s death a desperate suicide, was that Giangiacomo Feltrinelli was the organizer of the attacks and Valpreda the material perpetrator of the bombing of the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura.

            Feltrinelli would eventually die during the attempted destruction (with explosives) of a power line pylon at Segrate, Milan, on March 14, 1972. Men of Feltrinelli’s Milanese entourage would be involved in various degrees in the events that led to the 1973 killings at the police headquarters in Milan, the kidnapping of Judge Sossi in 1974, and the massacre of Piazza della Loggia in Brescia in the same year.

            In 1974, an extreme left militant was found with flyers signed by the neo-fascist Squadre d’Azione Mussolini. Feltrinelli and Lazagna had insisted very much on the necessity of carrying out false flags attacks and attributing them to fascists. The objective was probably to strengthen the insurrectional wing of the Communist Party against the side favorable to a dialogue with the Christian Democrats. Because, it must not be forgotten, that was the goal at the time. The strategy of tension was a means to that. The reasoning was the following: If, the revolutionary left were afraid of a Greek style coupe, it is more likely that it would have chosen self-defense, dragging in the proletariat and the communist electoral base, breaking with the policy of gradual reforms. If, on the other hand, the reactionary block was afraid of the new partisan bands and chased dreams of a coupe d’état, so much the better. Every polarization favors the opposite one. If that rendered possible a series of creeping subversive societal transformations which actually aim at the restructuring of capitalism that would be another matter. More farsighted people were working at that, and neither Lazagna nor Feltrinelli were among them. (Whoever wanted to read, just for fun, the analysis of that period by Lazagna and Feltrinelli would be amazed by their superficiality and roughness). 

            As far as the bombing of Piazza Fontana is concerned, there are trails that converge on Feltrinelli and on the Gotha of the Italian “incendiary” faction, in connection with the Italian Communist Party as well as with foreign communist apparatuses, with British and Israeli infiltration; and lead to the crossroads of the foreign capitals were terrorism organized and found a backing, such as Prague, Paris and Berlin.

            It is very likely that Feltrinelli and comrades were guilty, although it cannot be established with certainty. However, the Feltrinelli trail - which was never followed - is much more solid than all the others there were pursued after the Piazza Fontana slaughter.

            The ferment of 1968 was very much the humus on which the tension would feed, and was characterized by reciprocal contamination between extreme positions. Therefore, the anarcho-fascists collaboration in Rome, and the influence of Franco Freda in the Venetia would become the main elements of the partisan and preordained judiciary version of the events. They would provide the partisan investigators the thread, the fil rouge that leads to the massacre. If, initially, these interactions among opposites were described as fascist infiltration to push the anarchists to commit the crimes, eventually the ones would replace the others in the official historiography and the crimes would become purely neo-fascist acts.

            And, so they tell us, that was the fruit of a strategy defined in 1965 at the Parco dei Principi Hotel meeting about communist insurrection that we mentioned at the beginning. 

 

A stone in Piazza Fontana, placed by the City of Milan, which perpetuates the falsities about the bombing.

 

            The importance of the bombing of Piazza Fontana, which has been described as the “mother of all Italian massacres”, remains fundamental. Not only because it is an archetype and because by examining it every manipulator would be able to study its effects to capitalize on the consequences, but also because the theorem of the burning Reichstag would become the main thread of all the judiciary and historiography distortions of the “years of lead.”

            The historic memory and the soul of Italy were the other victims of that bombing at the National Bank of Agriculture from which they have never fully recovered.

 

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[1] The declaration was published on Lotta Continua in October 1971 and was signed by Elio Aloisio, Giulio Carlo Argan, Marino Barengo, Tinto Brass, Giampaolo Bultrini, Michele Canonica, Bruno Caruso, Alessandro Casillin, Giuseppe Catalano, Mario Ceroli, Lucio Colletti, Tullio De Mauro, Umberto Eco, Elvio Fachinelli, Manuele Fontana, Lucio Gambi, Emilio Garroni, Natalia Ginzburg, Carlo Gregoretti, Luciano Guardigli, Renato Izozzi, Franco Lefevre, Francesco Leonetti, Giulio Alfredo Maccacaro, Giancarlo Maiorino, Paolo Mieli, Franco Mogni, Franco Mulas, Valentino Orsini, Enzo Paci, Giorgio Pecorini, Paolo Pernici, Paolo Portoghesi, Domenico Porzio, Giovanni Raboni, Nelo Risi, Serena Rossetti, Giuseppe Samonà, Salvatore Samperi, Sergio Saviane, Vladimiro Scatturin, Mario Scialoja, Pasquale Squitieri, Manfredo Tafuri, Saverio Tutino, Francesco Valentini, Cesare Zavattini, Alfredo Zennaro, Giovan Battista Zorzoli.

It recites: “We affirm therefore that, when the citizen accused by you (Turin District Attorney for the Republic) say that, in our society, the Army is a capitalist tool of repression of the class struggle, we say it with them. When they say: “if it’s true that the rich are thieves, then retaking what they stole is right,” we also say it. When they yell: “Class struggle! Let us arm the masses!” We yell it too. When they swear to “fight, one day, with our weapons against the state until the liberation from the capitalists and exploitation” we also swear it.”